Born in Jerusalem in 1933, Rifa‘at A. Abou-El-Haj attended the Friends School in Ramallah from 1949 to 1952, when he immigrated to the United States. He graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1956 and received his PhD in History and Oriental Studies at Princeton University in 1963 with a dissertation entitled “The Reisülküttab and Ottoman Diplomacy at Karlowitz.” In 1967, Abou-El-Haj published select conclusions from his dissertation in the Journal of the American Oriental Society.Footnote ¹

While he was still at graduate school, Abou-El-Haj started teaching at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. In 1964, he moved jobs to Long Beach State College, which became California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), in 1972. In the early years of his career, he worked on the period that immediately followed the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) and published “The Formal Closure of the Ottoman Frontier in Europe: 1699-1703.”Footnote ² He also flirted with psychohistory very briefly in “The Narcissism of Mustafa II (1695-1703): A Psychohistorical Study.”Footnote ³

During the 1970s, his interests shifted to new sociopolitical structures that arose in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century Ottoman world, as evidenced by “The Ottoman Vezir and Paşa Households 1683-1703: A Preliminary Report,”Footnote ⁴ which laid down one of the central arguments in his work: the growth of a new political elite that challenged the centrality of the sultan and his household. During this decade, he seems to have grown increasingly frustrated both with traditional approaches to Ottoman history and with newer approaches that he found lacking in theoretical grounding. While reviewing the first volume of Stanford Shaw's History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, he wrote:

Taking a critical approach to decline, however, was not enough by itself for Abou-El-Haj as he noted in his review of Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History:

Abou-El-Haj's growing interest in Ottoman sociopolitical history during the 1970s culminated in his first monograph, The Rebellion of 1703 and the Structure of Ottoman Politics (1984),Footnote ⁷ which was the first in-depth analysis (in English) of a deposition in modern Ottoman historiography within its larger sociopolitical context. In it, he demonstrated how the political authority of the sultan came to be limited by other components of the Ottoman polity, such as the military, the jurists, and the grandees the graduates of whose households gradually came to replace the devshirme recruits of the royal household in imperial administration. He also underlined the rebels’ concern for the legitimacy of their actions, which they secured by continually consulting with the jurists. Most importantly, he argued that a weakened sultanate did not mean decline; rather, it signaled a structural transformation in the polity.

Abou-El-Haj continued publishing on Ottoman sociopolitical history throughout the 1980s, gradually sharpening his focus on the advice literature, in such articles as “The nature of the Ottoman state in the latter part of the XVIIth century,”Footnote ⁸ “Fitnah, huruc ala al-sultan and nasihat: Political struggle and social conflict in Ottoman society, 1560s-1700s,”Footnote ⁹ “The Ottoman nasihatname as a discourse over ‘morality,’”Footnote ¹⁰ and “Ārā’ ‘arabiyya ‘an al-inḥiṭāt al-‘uthmānī fī’l-qarn al-sābi‘ ‘ashar.”Footnote ¹¹ His approach to the advice literature was a direct challenge to earlier approaches that saw in them simply disinterested observers of the Ottoman “decline.” Instead, he argued that these authors represented the interests of an “ancient” political class that was being challenged by “modern” political actors whose rise was a product of commercialization.

In the 1980s, Abou-El-Haj also published articles that engaged with the history and historiography of Arab lands under the Ottomans, such as “The Social Uses of the past: Recent Arab Historiography of Ottoman Rule,”Footnote ¹² “An Agenda for Research in History: The History of Libya between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,”Footnote ¹³ and “Taxation, Trade, Production and Society in 16th C. Mosul (According to the Liva Kanunnameler).”Footnote ¹⁴

Abou-El-Haj's most influential work was his second book, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (1991).Footnote ¹⁵ As stated by Suraiya Faroqhi and Cornell Fleischer, who wrote a preface to the book,

Abou-El-Haj was demanding the same kind of respect for the Ottoman historical experience that historians trained in Europe and North America were according to European history but depriving non-western history from. Rather than “decline,” Abou-El-Haj identified the formation processes of a modern state in the Ottoman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Formation of the Modern State, he thus offered a concrete example of a “more consciously delineated theoretical model” that he had found lacking in earlier attempts at revisionist approaches to Ottoman historiography. The “classical” period was marked by a class-state in which there was almost no distinction between the ruling class and the state. Growing commercialization and the social mobility it produced created new political actors who competed for the control of the state that was in the process of becoming autonomous, thus separating itself from the ruling class. In short, the development of the modern Ottoman state was not the result of external pressures; it was the product of primarily internal dynamics.

Even though CSULB did not have a PhD program in history, Abou-El-Haj came together with students and faculty in reading circles in the larger Los Angeles area. He thus made an impact on the lives of many aspiring Ottomanists, including Heath Lowry and the late Donald Quataert (d. 2011), who were PhD students at UCLA in the late 1960s and the early 1970s and remained close to him later in their careers as well. Abou-El-Haj dedicated his second book to the later members of his reading circle, including Middle East Studies Association's (MESA) immediately Past President Dina Khoury. In 1992, he moved to SUNY Binghamton and joined Quataert in the History Department there. Together, they turned Binghamton into a major center in Ottoman history, training many graduate students who are currently working all over the United States (and Turkey).

With Irene A. Bierman and Donald Preziosi, Abou-El-Haj co-edited The Ottoman City and Its Parts: Urban Structure and Social Order (1991), in which his “Power and Social Order: The Uses of the Kanun,”Footnote ¹⁷ appeared. He continued to publish influential articles on Ottoman sociopolitical history until his retirement in 2014. Some examples are “Aspects of the Legitimation of Ottoman Rule as Reflected in the Preamble to Two Early Liva Kannunnameler,”Footnote ¹⁸ “The Expression of Ottoman Political Culture in the Literature of Advice to Princes (Nasihatnameler), Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries,”Footnote ¹⁹ “The Role of Women in the Ottoman Empire: How the khassa Reproduces the khassa — Elite Reproduction in Sixteenth Century Ottoman Jerusalem,”Footnote ²⁰ and “A Probe into the Social: Ottoman Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century.”Footnote ²¹

In 1996-97, Abou-El-Haj taught at Princeton (as Ertegün Visiting Professor) where he made significant impact in the training of several graduate students who continued their relationship with him during the following two and a half decades. Some of these students and his colleagues and friends, including those from his reading circle in the Los Angeles area, came together at a conference convened by the late Donald Quataert in 2010 at Binghamton. Quataert's preface to the conference volume is an excellent assessment of Abou-El-Haj's multi-faceted contributions to the field.Footnote ²² MESA recognized his contributions to mentorship of graduate students in 2017 with a Mentoring Award:

Abou-El-Haj was very well known for his critical appraisals of the field that appeared in the shape of book reviews and such articles as “Historiography in West Asian and North African Studies since Said's Orientalism,”Footnote ²⁴ which introduced the concept of neo-Orientalism. He remained committed to theoretical approaches that render Ottoman history comparable to other histories, exploring paths that could free historians from the confines of the nation-state as he did in “Theorizing in historical writing beyond the nation-state: Ottoman society in the middle period,”Footnote ²⁵ which was republished as an afterword in the second edition of his Formation of the Modern State (2005).Footnote ²⁶ Thanks to the translation of both of his monographs into Turkish,Footnote ²⁷ he developed a large following in Turkey where his visit in 2018 occasioned interviews in the press.Footnote ²⁸ At a workshop convened by Walter Feldman at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2018, he could see the impact he made on the field, which was reflected on the title of the workshop: A Locally Generated Modernity: The Ottoman Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century. The locally generated nature of Ottoman modernity, which Rifa‘at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj spent his career arguing for, had finally come to occupy a central place in contemporary Ottoman historiography.